Case Study: Cyberus Hypervisor in secunet medical connect

Introduction: How Cyberus Hypervisor helps secunet innovate with medical connect

secunet, germany’s leading IT security solutions provider, was looking to build a new edge gateway platform aimed at the healthcare market. For this product, secunet needed a virtualization partner that provides a secure technical base to ensure

Strong security and compliance: Ensuring process and patient data is kept secure and compliance standards are met.
High reliability and performance: Providing a stable, reliable, and secure virtualization base that can efficiently isolate customer workloads.
Expert technical guidance: They were looking for a stable platform, with high reliability and security and a team of experts that could help them with additional features and efficient maintenance. secunet’s team needed to focus on building their product and on providing value to their customers without worrying about integration and potential bugs in the underlying virtualization engine.

secunet and Cyberus have a long history of collaboration. Recently Cyberus helped design and implement integral processes and building blocks for secunet’s internal Software Factory. secunet needed a partner that could deliver to the high standards for software quality, reproducibility and process automation developed as part of the Software Factory. secunet medical connect is the first product developed on the Software Factory from start to finish. The Cyberus Hypervisor is a “shared component” of the Software Factory as a standard hypervisor, and therefore part of secunet medical connect.

The Challenge: Finding a Secure and Scalable Virtualization Solution

While evaluating various virtualization solutions, secunet experienced several drawbacks:

Open-Source complexity and security gaps: Qemu has a large feature-set, but almost as many open security issues. It is extremely cumbersome to configure Qemu in a way that gets the job done and leaves no gaping holes in the security concept. Its complexity slows down development and makes it harder to ensure compliance.
Limited flexibility with microkernel approaches: Many lightweight hypervisors lacked the necessary tooling, hardware support, and adaptability required to quickly build a market-ready product which is useable in different use cases and environments. These use cases range from connecting machines and machine clusters, to acting as a cloud hub or as a security gateway for healthcare locations.

Why Secunet Chose Cyberus Hypervisor: Faster Time-to-Market and Reliable Support

secunet needed a solution and an experienced virtualization partner, that could help them with fast & reliable support, expert advise and additional on-demand feature development.

Expert Support & Customization: Cyberus Hypervisor, a modern, open-source Hypervisor built for the Edge and the Cloud was a perfect fit for them. Cyberus’ highly skilled technical team provides the know-how and pragmatic, solution-oriented approach the medical connect team was looking for in a partner. Long-term support ensures a stable base to work from for the secunet product team.
Faster Time-to-Market: Cyberus engineers contributed to a fast time-to-market by providing advise and implementing valuable features and optimizations for secunet’s product team.
Built for the Future: The technical base for Cyberus Hypervisor — Linux, KVM and Cloud Hypervisor — ensures that all the tooling, such as NixOS and its powerful module system, and integration that engineers are used to just work and that modern hardware platforms are supported efficiently.

The Solution: How Cyberus Hypervisor Enabled Secure and Efficient Product Development

By using Cyberus Hypervisor as the base virtualization platform, secunet:

Focused on customer value: Since secunet uses Cyberus Hypervisor as base virtualization platform, secunet’s team was able to focus on providing value to their customers and build a product that fits the needs of the healthcare market perfectly.
Saved time and resources: By relying on Cyberus Hypervisor as a proven standard from the Software Factory, the team was able to build the base platform faster, with high confidence in the security properties and focus on additional value-add, such as device & security monitoring, remote maintenance access, protocol translators, secure data interfaces and much more. Using the standard and the support of Cyberus has certainly saved months of manpower. In addition, we were able to start without any time delay (need to building up knowledge, hiring the right experts, etc.) and were able to continuously use new releases via “drop in replacements” and without much effort.
Ensured adaptability: The abstraction both at the hardware and application level, enabled by Cyberus Hypervisor, enables secunet to provide a product that caters to the different needs of large and small IT security and service teams.

Conclusion: Empowering Secunet with Cyberus Hypervisor for Sustainable Growth

By incorporating the Cyberus Hypervisor, secunet could:

Stop worrying about virtualization: Instead, they delivered a solution that provides great value to their customers (by meeting the stringent demand of the healthcare market).
Leverage our flexible service contracts: Cyberus can enable your business to do the same with flexible pay-as-you-go Service Contracts for our proven open-source Hypervisor. We provide peace-of-mind, long-term support and proven engineering expertise for anything related to operating systems and virtualization.

Our flexible service contracts help you save costs during development and get to market quickly. We ensure long-term reliability and security for the most critical piece of software infrastructure in any edge device. Get Started with the open-source edition, or book a free virtualization requirements assessment with our experts today.

What our partners say?

" The cooperation with Cyberus Technology was a decisive factor for us in successfully launching our edge gateway platform medical connect in the market. The team's expertise and commitment have been instrumental in enabling us to offer our customers a secure and reliable solution. "

Torsten Redlich

Global Head of Medical Security, secunet Security Networks AG

Learn More about Cyberus Hypervisor